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TORONTO — As curses go, the Chicago Cubs' World Series drought has always seemed more quaint than the curse that once afflicted the Boston Red Sox — more a beer buzz than the vomit-spewing, gut-wrenching, bile-filled Curse of the Bambino stuff.
Maybe it's a Midwestern versus New England thing, but the literature coming out of the Cubs' drought isn't as tortured as the stuff that was churned out until the Red Sox finally won. I mean, c'mon — Steve Bartman, a goofy-looking guy with glasses? A billy goat? Tough to get all worked up about that, no? And maybe that explains last night's Reedgasm at the Rogers Centre. Really. With the Toronto Blue Jays leading 3-2 and one out in the ninth inning and closer B.J. Ryan on the mound desperately needing something good to happen after a torturous run of late, Toronto's baseball fans showed their appreciation for Cubs pinch hitter Reed Johnson by standing and cheering their former fan favourite.
And cheering.
And cheering.
And cheering. They stood for his one-pitch at-bat — a grounder to second base. "You don't see that all the time," Blue Jays manager John Gibbons said later. "He's a fan-favourite-type guy. A guy you pull for." A.J. Burnett added: "I think we all think that, deep down, Reed deserves it." Nobody knows what Ryan, who recorded the final out with the tying run on first, thought of the moment because he wouldn't talk afterward, something about being filmed in the clubhouse on Thursday after his third loss of the season, with the video being televised after he declined to comment. Some guys get misquoted (Larry Walker once told me he'd been "misparaphrased"). Turns out you can also be misfilmed.
At any rate, this game all one of those good-fun things. As Burnett himself noted, the Blue Jays were a team in need of something new, something fresh. He was on to something, methinks.
The Cubs are in Toronto this weekend thanks to interleague play, one of commissioner Bud Selig's good ideas — not as good as the expanded playoff format, but an all right idea.
(Less intrusive, to be certain, than the idiotic idea of instituting instant replay for home-run calls, which apparently is going to be put into effect on Aug. 1. It will put the game on the slippery slope toward instant replay on balls down the line. Instant replay is a Pandora's box. It can't be closed, and as the NHL showed in the playoffs, it can be screwed up handsomely.)
The problem for the Blue Jays, of course, is that without the Montreal Expos around, they really don't have a natural rival. They used to have a hate-on for the Detroit Tigers, and vice versa, but the teams never seem to meet any more. The Blue Jays might think they are rivals with the Red Sox and New York Yankees for obvious reasons, but it's pretty much a one-sided thing in that neither the Red Sox nor Yankees seem to regard the Blue Jays with any undue animosity. The Red Sox, in fact, seem to hate the Tampa Bay Rays more than the Blue Jays.
Toronto? Might as well be the Minnesota Twins or Kansas City Royals.
Absent that, we'll take novelty acts like the Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds, who will be in later next month as well as the Atlanta Braves, a National League team against which the Blue Jays do have a little history. Something about a World Series. The Reds will have Toronto's own Joey Votto with them and that ought to be cause for celebration. But the guess here is Votto's reception won't be as warm as that received by Johnson. This is Toronto, after all. The city that used to boo Bobby Orr on his visits, booed Ichiro Suzuki this week — and turned Tie Domi into a folk hero.
